Atomism, ancient

Ancient Greek atomism, starting with Leucippus and Democritus in the fifth century BC, arose as a response to problems of the continuum raised by Eleatic philosophers. In time a distinction emerged, especially in Epicurean atomism (early third century BC), between physically indivisible particles called 'atoms' and absolutely indivisible or 'partless' magnitudes. The term 'atom' (atomon), literally 'uncuttable', was coined in the fifth century BC by the first atomists, Leucippus and Democritus (§2). As the name suggests, its primary sense is an unbreakable particle, and their theory was certainly a physical one about the ultimate constituents of phenomenal bodies. Later theorists, in the late fourth century BC and after, sometimes spoke of 'partless' or 'minimal' magnitudes or bodies, terms which focus more on the mathematical aspects of the entities in question.